"London Transport Posters" celebrates a century of outstanding graphic design commissioned by the Underground, London Transport, and its present-day successor, Transport for London. This book explores the organisation's pioneering role as Britain's greatest patron of poster art, a unique role developed in the early twentieth century under the visionary leadership of Frank Pick. The selected artworks and posters, many published here for the first time, reflect a dazzling variety of period styles and techniques, produced by an extraordinary range of artists and designers attracted by the Underground's world-wide reputation. The resulting legacy includes works by practitioners as diverse as John Hassall, Edward McKnight Kauffer, Laura Knight, Man Ray, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Abram Games, William Roberts, Howard Hodgkin and David Shrigley.Drawing on newly researched sources in the archives of London Transport Museum and Transport for London, this book discusses and illustrates the different styles and themes emerging from the posters over the last hundred years. These include the contrasting approaches of commercial graphic designers and the group of modernist avant-garde artists commissioned by the Underground in the 1920s and 1930s; the use of posters to support the expansion of the Tube by attracting new audiences and selling an aspirational vision of suburbia; the important role of women in the development of poster advertising both as designers and consumers; the different uses of the transport poster during two world wars; the changing fortunes of the poster in the post-war period; and, the public view of posters from 1908 to the present day.More than 250 images are drawn from the London Transport Museum's collection of over 5000 posters and artworks, which represents the most complete graphic archive of its kind to be assembled by a single organisation over so long a period anywhere in the world. "London Transport Posters: A Century of Art and Design" is richly illustrated with examples of posters from all periods, and will be an invaluable reference book and visual resource for all those with an interest in twentieth-century design.

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About the Author:

David Bownes is Senior Curator at London Transport Museum. Oliver Green is Head Curator at London Transport Museum and has written and lectured extensively on London Transport's design history. Jonathan Black is a Senior Research Fellow in History of Art at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, with a special interest in early twentieth-century European art, cultural and military history. Emmanuelle Dirix is a design historian and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London and the London College of Fashion. Claire Dobbin is an art historian and Project Curator at London Transport Museum. Catherine Flood is a Curator of Prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London with responsibility for the Museum's poster collection. Bex Lewis is an Honorary Research Fellow in History at the University of Winchester. Alan Powers is Professor of Architecture and Cultural History at the University of Greenwich and has written extensively on twentieth-century British art and design. Paul Rennie is Head of Context in Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. Brian Webb is a practising designer who, with his former agency Trickett and Webb, designed a number of posters for London Underground.